From Taylor Swift and St Vincent to Lorde and Lana Del Rey, the list of successful female artists that producer Jack Antonoff has worked with - often multiple times - is a long one. It felt almost inevitable, then, that his path would one day cross with that of rising star Sabrina Carpenter, who’s rendered this year’s song of the summer argument pretty much redundant with the huge success of Espresso.
This isn’t an Antonoff production - credit for that one goes to Julian Bunetta - but follow-up single Please Please Please, already another huge hit for Carpenter, was helmed and co-written by the Bleachers frontman.
In fact, in a new interview with Rolling Stone, Carpenter says that Antonoff has worked on around half of her upcoming album, Short N’ Sweet, which will be released on 23 August.
All of which has led to a certain amount of eye-rolling in certain corners of the internet, where Antonoff’s production style is criticised as being monotonous and somewhat repetitive.
Carpenter, though, is having none of it. Addressing Antonoff’s critics, she says: "Fuck them all. I think he's one of the most talented people I've ever met. When he's in a room, he's able to literally touch every instrument in the room and make it sound magical. He also works very fast, which I really appreciate because I work very fast."
Carpenter says that she met Antonoff outside a comedy club in New York a couple of years ago. "I was peeing my pants because I wanted to work with him for my whole life,” she recalls. “After that, we, luckily enough, became friends; personalities meshed, and it was only a matter of time. He heard some of the stuff that I was working on for this album, and we just started to make magic."
Antonoff, meanwhile, praises Carpenter for being “an unbelievable singer,” adding that, ”When you're in the presence of that kind of voice, all you want to do is capture it."
Though it might be following Espresso up the charts, Please Please Please is a very different musical beast - and not, it should be said, immediately recognisable as an Antonoff cut.
"There's like an Olivia Newton [John] feeling, there's a Dolly feeling, there's an incredibly super modern pop feeling," reckons the producer. "The little vocal runs she does are so bizarre and unique - they're doing this really odd, classic, almost yodel-y country thing. She's becoming one of the biggest young pop stars, and that song is such a statement of expressing yourself, not just lyrically, but sonically."
